Dear Feastlings,
Only a week ago, it looked amazing: for the first time in months- MONTHS- we appeared to have enough staff to reopen on Sundays. Today, the jury out anew. Even with two of our kitchen staff out with their respective afflictions for several weeks, we thought we’d still be able to manage, but as we’ve been prepping for Thanksgiving, the dreaded text tones started chiming on the phones of what managers remain: “I’m running a fever;” “I can’t keep food down;” “I can’t work today and tomorrow isn’t looking good either.”
And in the moments since I started writing this, a server has been felled as well. Mercifully, no one appears to be afflicted with Covid this time, but the flu, if you weren’t aware, is clearly making its rounds.
So once again, we find ourselves at the precipice of normalcy. Will we open on Sunday this week? If I shook the magic 8-ball, it would likely say, “all signs point to yes,” but in the interest of only biting off *slightly* more than we can chew, our intention is this: open for the Last Sunday wine tasting,
and, assuming the remainder of the crew is fully stocked on vitamins C and D, Zinc and whatever else their preventative measure of choice is, we’ll roll right into dinner.
Meanwhile, nearly a dozen of us have been at it for the past two days working on prep for Thanksgiving pickups, and Cory and our friend Emilie have been putting together this Saturday’s wine tasting.
Today, I’m leaving the remaining prep in the crew’s capable and sanitized, gloved hands and working on the December menu and getting in the necessary ingredients to execute it, and likewise with our upcoming wine dinner with Stephen and Dale Ott of Nossa Imports,
and further down the line our back-to-back Sunday benefit dinners for the Rogue Theatre, a copy, with some poetic license, of Babette’s Feast.
And then, of course, I’ll set to work on the New Year’s Eve menu, when I come up for what I hope is clean, fresh air, free of flu virus. Stay well, all of you.
Doug